Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

People don’t work like computers. Our identities, our thoughts, and our beliefs can’t always be sorted easily into two categories. In the world we live in, we set up two distinct categories – man and woman – that everyone must choose between. But that doesn’t actually reflect the full diversity of the human experience.’

As we expand our field of view, we come to realize that everything impacts everything else – and we find meaning in these interrelationships.

Ecology teaches us that we exist by virtue of our ties to one another and to the more-than-human world, and that those ties are strengthened, not weakened, by the inclusion and equal participation of each and every member of that network. The strength and resilience of computational networks, the inherent power of distribution and interconnection,

If our inability to tell meaningful, actionable stories about our changing planet is part of the problem, then we need to rethink the tools we use to make culture itself. Technology can be part of this communal, sense-making process. In order for this to happen, we need to stop using it as a way to constrain time and enforce our narrow perspective,

around us when we consider how we relate to everything else. Being itself is relational: a matter of interrelationships.

To be non-binary, in human and machinic terms, is to reject utterly the false dichotomies that produce violence as the direct consequence of inequality. A culture of binary language splits us in two, and makes us choose which parts of ourselves fit existing power structures. To assert non-binariness is to heal this divide and to make different clai

I’ve come to understand, more deeply than ever before, is that the enemy is not technology itself, but rather inequality and centralization of power and knowledge, and that the answer to these threats are education, diversity and justice. You don’t need artificial intelligence to work that out. You need actual intelligence. But more importantly, yo

What we perceive as borders and conflicts – the things which separate us – often turn out not to be artefacts of the exterior world, but immeasurable gaps in our own conceptions, abilities and tools of discernment. We think we are studying the world – but in reality we are merely making evident the limits of our own thinking, which are embodied in

Symbiosis is not a vision of perfect harmony – far from it. The world is not composed of harmonious or even equitable relationships, but it is composed of relationships, and more of those are mutually beneficial than they are antagonistic. ‘Life’, writes Margulis, ‘did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking.’

This is notably counter to the belief – dominant in electoral systems, laboratories, corporations and social organizations – that there exists a mythical best person for the job, capable of engaging with any number of different areas of policy; or some group of ordained experts to whom those of lesser knowledge and experience must defer. It has bee